


What We Do to Each Other

by marauders_groupie



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Childhood Friends, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Nostalgia, artist!Clarke, writer!bellamy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 08:32:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6044998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauders_groupie/pseuds/marauders_groupie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Bellarke AU in which Bellamy and Clarke are childhood best friends, separated by life and trying to relearn each other again.</p><p>*</p><p> <i>"You would, yeah."</i></p><p>  <i>He frowns at her wistfulness, looking like he's caught between spreading his arms for her and rejecting every memory they made together. "I would what?"</i></p><p>  <i>"Fill your apartment with books, have a fire escape so you can run away a little and - and I bet you still keep sunflower seeds around, don't you?"</i></p><p>  <i>Bellamy flashes her a rueful smile and she's back into the day they shared her bed, his body curled into hers as they watched their lives being pulled apart at the seams.</i></p><p>  <i>This is the real distance, and it is not measured in miles. It is measured in time you spent away, time that is lost, time that can never be brought back.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	What We Do to Each Other

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I'm actually super excited to post this because I wrote the entirety of this fic in one day - to be precise, seven hours in which I didn't eat, rest or drink until I finished it. I was on a roll. And my main inspiration for this was seeing a photo of a fire escape so go figure. 
> 
> I can only say that this fic is my child, I love it, and I hope you'll love it, too. :)
> 
> The title is from Richard Siken's Detail of the Fire - “Let’s admit without apology, what we do to each other.”
> 
> Enjoy!

 

It hits Clarke like a punch right in the stomach, his name printed in golden letters on the cover of a book in the window of Barnes & Noble.

At first she thinks - _this can't be right_. Bellamy Blake is a memory, not a person made out of flesh and blood, a living, breathing thing that lives and hopes and loves.

No, Bellamy will always be the memory of a seventeen year old boy with threadbare shirt collars, jeans scraped at the knees, patched up splitting seams, hands shoved into the pockets and ducking his head to hide a smile she always wanted to see the most.

Hiding, always hiding, and running away even more than she ever got to.

The book's cover is beautiful, Persephone depicted with a crown fashioned out of black flowers, a bleeding heart in her hands, and she doesn't even see the title, just rushes into the bookstore like a hurricane is threatening to envelop her.

She sees him by the counter, the telltale sign of her stomach plummeting, her heart slowing down to almost nothing as she stands and watches the man she used to know as a boy. His inky curls are as wild as ever, that perpetual storm that was his life seeping into every bit of his appearance, and if he turned around, came just a little closer (she used to dare him to, sometimes, when she was young and brave and triumphant) - Clarke could probably find the same constellations in his freckles.

His shoulders are broader, the patches in his blazer don't look like he made them on his own, but he is still a boy whose back is breaking underneath the weight of the world and now she knows that there was no bravery in challenging him.

The clerk laughs at something Bellamy said and in a split second, he turns around. She feels the moment he recognizes her, her heartbeat picking up the pace, a little death all of its own.

" _Clarke_ ," he mouths, worry and confusion battling on his face, eyebrows drawn together above a stern gaze.

The clerk watches as Bellamy excuses himself, crosses what little distance there is between him and Clarke, frozen by the magazine rack, the world slowing down as it tips on its axis, holds its breath just for them.

"Clarke."

She swears she can hear " _I found you_ " in the way he speaks her name, incredulous.

Years of bitterness have hardened him, she can tell. There are walls between them when he smiles carefully where he once smiled with enough ferocity to set the whole world on fire.

"Bellamy, I-" the words are heavy on her tongue, weighed by her heart drumming out a march in her chest, but she takes the step and it feels like miles, "You're here."

"Eleven years."

Eleven years, two weeks and four days. Eleven years, two weeks and four days since she found a smudged letter on her porch, the Blakes' house closed up with a sign "For sale" in the front yard.

Eleven years, two weeks and four days since she realized that she had held him for the last time, unknowing but feeling a storm that was about to brew. Eleven years, too much, too much, since her mother had held her and told her that people leave sometimes and it's alright because if you love someone, you've got to set them free.

"How have you been?"

A muscle in his jaw ticks; the two of them were never fit for small talk, but he complies.

"Good. Really good. I published a book."

She smiles at him for the first time, noticing that he still runs his fingers through his hair when he's nervous, cranes his neck into his shoulders just a little. He's taller now but he feels smaller.

"Congratulations. I never doubted you."

It is a relief to see that she's not the only one with a flood of memories rushing in. There were moments when he doubted every step he took and she believed in him. He did the same for her, many many times.

"No, you didn't," he agrees, nodding before snapping his head towards the clerk and finally, looking like he's come to a decision. "Are you doing anything? Because I have a book signing and I'd love to catch up with you. I -" he looks torn and a vindictive part of Clarke is glad when he breaks, "I missed you."

"I'll wait."

Waiting is the symphony of her life, the best muse she's ever had, and waiting she can do.

"Thank you."

He doesn't get 'I missed you, too' and Clarke knows that he understands why.

 

*

 

He used to have his nose stuck in his books - the most beautiful form of escapism, and on the walk back to his apartment, it's stuck in his coat.

Bellamy Blake wears coats, writes books and lights a cigarette in the brisk December air like he's a drowning man gasping for air.

It's different but it's still him, beneath all of that. It's different and the thought is not welcomed but Clarke thinks she could probably love him again.

"How is Octavia?"

"Great. She's in China now, writes for NatGeo and generally keeps having the time of her life."

Octavia's accomplishments always brought a smile to his face, even if it was just winning the spelling bee.

The fondness in his voice makes Clarke's heart swell in her chest and it takes all of her might not to just snuggle into his side, press closer until they melt into each other.

But they are older now, magic is not a thing they can afford to believe in anymore, and that's why she does nothing.

"How is Wells?"

"Still trying to change the world," she answers.

"If anyone can do it, it’s him."

A beat of silence.

"So, how long are you in New York for?"

Bellamy frowns at that, yellow lights of early evening illuminating his face when he murmurs, "Indefinitely. I have been living here for a year."

_You never thought to call? You never once picked up the phone, drunk out of your mind, and wanted to spill your heart out? Wanted to cross Earth to find me?_

"That's nice."

Because _she_ did. Bellamy Blake has been her every drunken thought. When Finn let her down, she sat in her bathtub overflowing with water and wondered if life would've been different if Bellamy was there.

When Lexa left, Clarke wanted to call Bellamy and thank him because he taught her what loss felt like and it wasn’t able to hit her as hard.

And, as if he can read her mind ( _maybe he can_ , a nook in her brain screams, _maybe he can because he certainly was able to when you were young_ ), he says, “I wanted to find you but I knew you’d hate me.”

“Hate you?” Clarke asks, her voice dripping with bitterness. She can’t help it. It’s always the worst with people you had once loved; it’s so easy to hate them because there are so many leftover emotions, those that could not be channeled into happy moments, into intertwining of fingers and little smiles.

All those things, just sitting tight in her heart, all the words she wanted to say and things she wanted to do with him. They used to talk about growing up, getting a huge house to fit all of their friends, having a dog and maybe even a white picket fence, just so Clarke could paint it pink as Bellamy writes in the yard.

They used to talk about growing up and growing old together.

 _Of course_ it’s easy to hate him now.

Bellamy nods, a curt thing that shows how uncomfortable he is. They used to share everything and now he can’t even look her in the face.

“Yeah, I hate you,” she agrees, feels a pang of dark satisfaction when he flinches, curls bouncing on his shoulders. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear from you.”

She’s come up with more stories about him than he had ever come up with about his literary characters. In one, he was as he is – a writer, kind, his words showing how bitter life is but never failing to write a happy ending, or one as happy as it can be. Realistic, but magical. In that story of his life, the one she came up with because she didn’t know who he has been throughout all these years, he is kind because the world has been unkind to him.

That one is her favorite.

In the other, he had changed his name, moved away to a place she could never reach, spent his nights playing a guitar ineptly in a bar, kissed beautiful girls who didn’t smell like charcoal and strawberries, and he was everything she never thought he could be.

In the third, he was mist. He was hazy and dreamlike, there but not quite. A blur of rapid movements, slow songs and vibrant laughter.

Bellamy was a lot of things in the stories she made up to fill the gap he left in her heart, but Clarke always longed to truly know.

Now she does.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this but – it makes sense.”

“Sure it does.” She softens at the sight of his turmoil, resists the urge to hug him like she used to when he’d worry. “You were my best friend. Of course I’d want to know how you are.”

And in a different life, he still is.

“You never stopped being mine,” he admits in that way of his – just saying things without expecting a reply. _That_ hasn’t changed.

 

*

 

His apartment is on the third floor, a polite-looking building in one of the safer neighborhoods. Even though he could probably afford more, Clarke understands why he’s got an apartment with exposed brick wall in the kitchen, one bedroom and a whole lot of space to dream in.

"You would, yeah."

He frowns at her wistfulness, looking like he's caught between spreading his arms for her and rejecting every memory they made together. "I would what?"

"Fill your apartment with books, have a fire escape so you can run away a little and - and I bet you still keep sunflower seeds around, don't you?"

Bellamy flashes her a rueful smile and she's back into the day they shared her bed, his body curled into hers as they watched their lives being pulled apart at the seams.

This is the real distance, and it is not measured in miles. It is measured in time you spent away, time that is lost, time that can never be brought back.

"You've still got paint smudges on your hands," he points out, probably feeling victorious for it.

"Never could wash them away."

Clarke never could wash _him_ away.

"Not a lot has changed, then."

_It has, so much._

"Yeah," she lies because she could never force herself to break his heart when truth was too painful. "Not at all."

But it has. The paint used to be red and green and blue, thousand shades for thousand emotions she could only express on canvas - only then was she free of the clumsy grasping for words, biting into her lower lip and failing to find them.

Now the paint is red, crimson, scarlet, and her art shows anger bubbling underneath her skin in every waking moment.

She has become a professional in lying, without knowing whether she's keeping her loved ones safe from harm or herself.

The wine he pours into two mismatched glasses is dry, the taste faintly reminiscent of apples, and Clarke smiles at Bellamy. His couch is comfortable, worn leather and a throw blanket messily curled up in the corner, but he’s not sharing it with her. No, he’s sitting in an armchair across from Clarke, elbows leaned on his knees and just watching like he’s not exactly sure what to do with her.

“I didn’t know you’d started drinking wine.”

It feels like uncovering him, bit by bit. Some things are still the same, some have changed, the most she can live with.

And again – she wants to live with them. There is a big chunk of her heart that’s begging her to just run away as far as possible, hurt him like he’s hurt her, but that one feeling at the core of who Clarke Griffin is feels a primal need for Bellamy. And for that, she is at war with herself.

“Yeah, I had a vodka mishap when I was twenty. Miller had to – “ he stops himself suddenly, searching Clarke’s face for any signs of discomfort. Of course he had a life, it wasn’t like she expected him to stop living just because she wasn’t there. When she shows none, he continues. “Miller, my best friend, he had to drive me to the hospital and I’ve been steering clear of it ever since.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” She could have been there. It wouldn’t have changed anything, but it would be her hands holding his sweaty curls back, her voice whispering that everything is going to be alright and her back cracking because she slept in an uncomfortable waiting room chair all night.

Bellamy smiles at her and she thinks she sees a bit of who he used to be in it. “Young and crazy, right? What about you?”

They try to re-learn each other that evening, making small steps in a direction that feels right. It’s still distorted, knowing and not knowing him at the same time, seeing the hints of the same boy in the way his fingertips brush against her elbow as he wishes her a good night, and then his face falling as soon as he thinks she can’t see him.

But it’s alright, it’s alright. She wants him back and she’s willing to ignore the quiet voice in her heart begging, _you two were just an almost – why do you want to fight so hard?_

 

*

 

Clarke’s phone rings on the first day of December, after no sign of Bellamy in two weeks which she has spent overanalyzing every little thing and, despite the paint dripping off of her hands, she scrambles for her phone.

It’s him, of course, always appearing when she least expects him to, but she takes the call.

“Bellamy?”

“I wasn’t sure if this was a good idea,” he blurts out and Clarke smiles a little, leaning on her kitchen island and pushing away the stray mugs blotted with coffee stains, “but I wanted to call you. I know you probably hate me but I had to try. You deserve an explanation for everything that’s happened, better than that shitty letter I left you.”

“Okay.”

“Just like that?” He sounds confused.

“I’m curious.”

He’s probably frowning and it makes her smile wider at the handprint paint left on the marble in front of her. She’ll scrub it off some other day.

“Can you come over tonight? I’ll cook.”

“That depends. Am I going to get food poisoning?”

His chuckle reminds her of their bad days, when one of them would tell a joke so incredibly stupid it was impossible not to laugh. Storm clouds dissipating.

“No, don’t worry. I got better at it.”

 

That night, she lingers in front of his building, half in shadows, half in the light, with a scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. She’s endlessly torn between thinking that this is a good idea and the worst one so far.

But she takes the plunge.

His cheeks are red beneath his freckles when he opens the door, hair messy and all over the place, a look of certain wilderness to his eyes. There’s an apron wrapped around his waist, the sleeves of his grey Henley fit his muscles like a glove and Clarke wants to hate him but can’t find it in her heart.

“You look wrecked,” she tells him, pushing between him and the doorway to step into his apartment, toasty warm that brings back the feeling to her fingertips. “Were you attacked by the cooking Kraken?”

“Cute,” he shoots back, motioning for her to join him in the kitchen where there’s way too many pots and pans for the Bellamy who could barely make toaster strudel, much less an actual meal. “I’m trying to impress you so you’d forgive me.”

There he goes again, those things no one else would dare say out loud but he does. Never expecting anything in return.

He never did, not really. Clarke’s first memories of him were elementary school, this quiet (but feisty when called upon) boy who wouldn’t move his eyes from one book or the other. His favorites were books about heroes, myths, stories about fighting the dragons and saving them, worlds which were not only black or white but endless shades of gray in which, she now knows, he could find himself.

Not a lot had changed as they grew up, he still devoured books with a passion only people who desperately needed to be saved could manage, and she still remembers the first time he showed her what he wrote.

It was the worst, this story about a princess who slayed a dragon on her own – interesting premise but bad execution. Still, it dripped with a ferocious need to _escape_ and it had more heart than anything else Clarke has ever read.

 _He_ still has more heart than anyone else she’s met and he’s still the same boy, trying to escape even when he’s in the clear. The open window to the fire escape tells her that, the books colonizing every bit of free space tell her that, the cagey look in his eyes tells her that.

“I forgave you a long time ago.” It feels like she’s betraying herself but she’d give anything to lessen the pain he tries to keep hiding but Clarke is well attuned to. She knows the signs, she knows him like the back of her hand. Sometimes, that’s the worst part.

And she _did_ forgive him a long time ago, with Raven petting her hair, drunk out of her mind and her pillow salty with tears. She forgave him because she couldn’t keep hating him, just _couldn’t_. It was like going against who she is.

Bellamy turns off the stove as she spins around on the stool, legs swinging back and forth as she waits for him to get ready, and then he’s leaning on the counter, letting out an exasperated sigh.

“I’m sorry. I tried to explain why we had to leave in the letter, but. I should’ve just told you. You know how it was after my mom died, Octavia was in a really bad place, I couldn’t take care of her and – everything was such a fucking mess, Clarke. When our grandma said she could take us in, it was like a miracle.”

He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“But, of course, I didn’t want to leave _you_. And if I talked to you, just told you that I’m leaving, I know I would’ve stayed. I’m not putting it on Octavia but I needed to take care of her first. We’d just lost our mother and we fought all the time, I didn’t know what the fuck I was going to do. She’s my sister, she’s my – “

“Responsibility,” Clarke finishes for him, her chin in her palm, just watching him. A bitter little smile plays on his lips.

“You remembered.”

“Of course. You always said that.” His sister, his responsibility. Not expecting anything in return, never taking anything – just giving. Giving and giving and loving more than his heart probably can handle.

“I didn’t keep in touch because I’d always want to come back, you know? You cared, you always cared. When the rest of the fucking world hated me, you cared, Clarke. I didn’t want to get you into this mess, too. I didn’t want to spend my life pulled apart between needing to stay with Octavia and wanting to just go wherever you are.”

“Octavia comes first, I always knew that, Bellamy.” He flinches when she places her hand hesitantly on his forearm. “I was hurt that you couldn’t tell me face to face, that I had to learn about it in _a letter_. You said goodbye to Wells, Bellamy. That fucking hurt. I was your best friend, you always said that, and then you left just like that and – “

The memories are what wrecks her every time and Clarke feels the telltale prickling behind her eyes again, her breath catching in her throat as she remembers how small and how wounded she felt, how stupid, how unimportant.

She hates crying, the way words constrict in her mouth, only a sob coming out, but she presses on.

“I know we were kids, Bell, but I loved you. You were my best friend, I – You just left. Bellamy, you just _left_.”

The food burns while Bellamy keeps his hands tightly wrapped around her, every inch of her skin pressed to every inch of his, his curls getting in her eyes, his lips pressed to her forehead, and Clarke knows she should hate him but his arms still feel like coming home.

They’re on his couch by the time either one of them speaks, still tangled up in each other like when they were ridiculously codependent best friends at seventeen, and then it’s Bellamy with a strangled voice, half-asking, half-begging.

“You loved me?”

Clarke looks up at him, his crisp shirt scratching at her cheek and he just looks so fucking _raw_ , like this is the thing that is going to finally bring him down, like all the storms he has sailed through didn’t mean a thing compared to her.

She smiles because he’ll be her downfall, and she will be his, too. “Of course I did, Bellamy. How could I not?”

 

*

 

The space between them shifts after that night and Clarke finds that even though they are broken, the pieces still fit together. They need a little glue, a little fixing but so what? All the best things do.

Clarke hasn’t realized that she’d been just going through the motions until Bellamy cut across her life, like a supernova in the dark sky, kickstarting her soul again.

He is a hurricane, Bellamy Blake is. Clarke forgot how he could always make her laugh easily, how bright her whole life seemed with him by her side, and how unimportant everything else became when she could put up her feet in his lap at the end of the day.

Time always slowed down at Bellamy Blake’s command and she’d been craving it so much without even realizing.

They spend their afternoons together, catching up in his apartment over Chinese takeout and TV background noise, trading pieces of their lives with grateful smiles painted across their faces.

“I had to get my appendix taken out when I turned nineteen,” Clarke offers. “The anesthesia got me really high, I swear I talked about dragons.”

Bellamy’s laugh is something that she finds that she’s forgot after all this time, but it still makes her heart flip in her chest, happiness bubble up under her skin.

“Octavia ran away when she was sixteen. She got as far as New Mexico and called me in the middle of the night.”

“Did you go and get her?”

Bellamy just raises an eyebrow, exasperated. “Do you even have to ask?”

The dishes pile up in her sink, her paintings are left half-finished because the first thing she does after coming home from the gallery she works in with Lincoln is run back to Bellamy’s, where the door is always open.

She’s built this life, this thing she is relatively happy with, but the truth is –

It’s only now that she feels _good_. Like joy had been imprisoned in her body all this time and now here’s someone who had the key all along.

“I dropped out of college when I was in my junior year. My mom was pissed but she understood. She helped me a lot.”

They’re both successful in their fields and proud of each other. His book is still on Clarke’s bedside table, waiting to be read, but it intimidates her. She doesn’t know what she’ll find in there and she’s scared to death.

The first time Bellamy sees one of her paintings, he stops frozen in his tracks. Clarke wants to take a picture, run her fingertips across his face, hold her breath – do anything to keep that memory of him looking breathless at seeing her work.

“It’s – “

Beautiful? Wonderful? Great? Angry? Depressing? Somber?

Instead, what comes out is, “It’s – it makes me feel _understood_.” And then, after a beat, he must realize what he said and the tips of his ears go pink. “I’m sorry, is that a really wrong thing to say?”

“No, it’s why I paint.” Why she lets pieces of her soul leak onto the canvas, why she allows the whole world to see just how torn apart she is, why she doesn’t reach to cover the ugly parts of herself up. “So someone could look at this and feel understood, comforted.”

She loops her arm through his, directs him to the next piece. Lincoln is smiling at her but she doesn’t see it, she only has eyes for Bellamy who looks amazed and whose words make her feel bigger than her body.

“And it’s how you feel. That can _never_ be wrong.”

The next painting isn’t red and angry, it’s the first thing she painted after she saw him again, and it looks like a clear green field, illuminated by sunlight, even though there are purple stars above.

“What about this one?”

Bellamy thinks about it for a second, his hand covering hers, warm and solid. “This one makes me feel good. It’s peaceful, somehow.”

“Mm.”

They walk around the gallery that night, Clarke prompting and Bellamy responding the best he can. He doesn’t talk about the symmetry or the composition, but he talks about how he feels. Somehow, that is everything.

Lincoln leaves a wine bottle for them on the counter and she drags Bellamy, who is now amused by her ministrations of opening the bottle with her keychain, up to the rooftop.

The whole city is sprawled below them, the lights of New York hitting their eyes bright, and even though it’s cold, Bellamy takes the wine, smiles at this setting and she wonders whether it’s the same for writers – are there moments so hurtful that they tear your soul apart, but you still have to keep them because they deserve to be felt?

 

Bellamy never comes to her apartment, she notices. It’s always her who comes to him when she wants to. After a while, it’s clear that he feels like he owes that to her – to allow her to do things in her own time, in her own way.

They’ve still got miles to go but they’re doing well.

When she sees that he is still wary of spending money, eyeing the prices when they go grocery shopping, Clarke smiles at this familiar pang of nostalgia in her heart. He didn’t have it good, growing up, his mother working more than she should have, placing all the burden of raising a child, his sister, when he was no more than a child himself.

The lights are turned off when they’re not in the room and he never buys two cartons of milk if he only needs one.

She realizes that she’s mapping these bits about him, comparing them in her head, cataloguing them for safekeeping, as if he’s going to vanish again. And that’s really why she keeps returning to his apartment, never calls before dropping by – frightened that he might not pick up the phone and that a year of his life in that apartment would vanish into thin air.

It’s irrational but that’s what she does - she fears. She has him now, but for how long?

“I’m actually afraid that you’re going to leave again,” she confesses one night when they’ve got too much whiskey in their bloodstream, a change that was welcomed at the beginning of the night but is now starting to seem like a bad idea.

Bellamy tests the words on his lips before saying them, apprehensive, and _that’s_ why she worries. There are still walls between them, like they know that they could hurt each other if they break them down, and all of that reminds her of how she used to be after he left – distrusting, careful, not getting close to anyone because they could leave.

“I’m not going to.”

“I know that, but I don’t _believe_ it.”

He doesn’t ask how he can make her believe it, just calmly stands up from his kitchen chair and leaves into his bedroom. The only room she hasn’t seen already. What is she expecting to find there? That the truth isn’t what he’d told her, that the truth is really a plan of leaving as soon as he gets her to admit to loving him again?

When he returns, it’s with a beat-up old box that used to hold a pair of chuck taylors. He places it carefully on his lap, his chair screeching when he pulls it up next to hers, and it feels like getting to see the whole universe when he lifts the lid.

There are photos of them in there; eight and smiling without their front teeth, wearing overalls with dirty patches on their knees. Ten and playing soccer. Thirteen and rolling their eyes at whoever was taking the photo. Fifteen and frozen in a triumphant moment, laughing, their heads thrown back. Seventeen, two days before Clarke’s dad died, smiling on her couch and leaning into each other as Wells and Octavia throw up peace signs.

There are dates on the back of every photo, gone yellow with time, but Clarke smiles.

“You kept these.”

“Yeah.” He’s not relieved, just tired. “I have this, too.”

It’s a piece of paper, folded in half, color leaking through the thin sheet onto the back. When she unfolds it, Clarke realizes it’s the first drawing she let him keep (“Come on, Princess, it’s _me_ who’s on it. I think I get to keep it.”), her first piece that she showed to the world despite so much of herself being in it.

He accepted it gracefully and it was like a stone rolled off her chest.

“You’re really not leaving, then?” she asks after studying the drawing for a very long time and feeling Bellamy study her.

“Never. I promise.”

This time, she dares herself to trust him.

 

*

 

When Bellamy starts working on the sequel to his book, everything turns into a huge mess. He’s suddenly scatter-brained, as if the stars pull at his skin and he can’t rest until his fingertips touch the keyboard and he gets to work.

Those are the good days, when Clarke laughs as he comes up to her, looking serious while she’s just trying to make a decent mac and cheese. He seems a little unearthly, like he’s strayed into this world, taken a wrong turn and forgotten his way back home.

“Have you seen my glasses, Clarke?”

(She did always tell him that he’d ruin his eyes reading in the dark, but he never listened.)

Clarke looks around the kitchen, not finding a trace of them between empty coffee mugs and maps spread across the table. It’s only when she returns her gaze to him, frowning, that she lets out a light laugh, tapping the crown of his head gently.

“They’re right on top of your head.”

His apartment turns into a mess - crumpled pieces of paper, pencils that have been chewed on, character studies littering every bit of free space. He doesn’t ask her and she doesn’t tell, but Clarke is pretty sure that he knows she hasn’t read his book. No, it’s still haunting her nightstand and it might for a while.

But Bellamy in his element is beautiful and she doesn’t mind being ignored as he works. Her feet are still in his lap and he keeps shooting her apologetic glances as he fills the empty pages with his heart and soul.

The night he finishes the book, Clarke arrives to a dark apartment, nothing illuminating the hardwood floors but faint moonlight filtering through the windows. Just yesterday he was sitting on the couch, pulling at his hair because he couldn’t fix the main character’s motivation, but now there’s nothing.

Not a sound, not a hum.

Clarke makes her way through his apartment, finding every room empty. The only one she hasn’t dared to look in is his bedroom but she finally finds the courage, carefully opens the door and feels her heart plummet when the lock clicks open.

Bellamy is sitting on the bed, resting his head against the headboard with his eyes closed, but that’s not what catches her eye.

No, what catches her eye are the photos. Photos of them, photos of Octavia, of him and other people she hasn’t had the privilege of meeting. Photos and books, what must be hundreds of them, covering every single inch of the floor. Books with cracked spines, brand new books. Rolled up maps in the corner, a vintage globe people keep drinks in but Bellamy probably keeps trinkets, and three lamps arranged around the room randomly.

“Bellamy?” she calls out quietly, not daring to step over the threshold, afraid to break the spell.

When he hears her, he opens his eyes, a slow, lazy smile spreading on his lips and he motions her forward, taps the space on his bed right next to him.

It feels wrong, it feels right, but she does it anyways. She’s never going to understand a single thing about him but it’s alright.

There are things in life so beautiful that they hurt and Bellamy Blake is one of them.

She finds her place on his chest like she’s always belonged there and for a while, neither of them speaks. Bellamy cards his fingers through her hair, unwinds the knots created by days of letting her hair go frizzy, and Clarke rubs imaginary patterns into the fabric of his shirt – stars, planets, triangles and circles.

It feels like nothing is ever going to matter again.

“I finished the book,” he says.

“I know.”

He finally looks at peace and she lets him trail a hand up her back, hold her closer. She is going to worry tomorrow but tonight – tonight she gets this, Bellamy Blake pressed up to her with books full of unspoken words between them.

Tonight they are back to the glory days they left behind – screen doors slamming in their wake, firecrackers on the Fourth of July, fumbling with coolers full of illegally-obtained beer in the backseat on their way to one party of the other, midnight swims and driving with windows rolled down as they pass by neon signs.

She was lucky and he was not, now she knows. Now she knows how hard it must have been for him to pretend like everything was alright when they were loud and victorious, teenagers having fun and breaking the rules, when he knew he had to take care of his sister, when he carried a responsibility heavy enough to break grown people’s shoulders.

How could he be both? How could he find joy in his heart in those moments he must have felt stolen from time, moments in which he could be young? When all of the time he knew he would have to go back to the real life, to the life that wasn’t even living but surviving. An endless fight out of which he emerged victorious.

“Congratulations.” _Congratulations on your book, congratulations on making it through, congratulations on becoming a person fifteen year-old you would be proud of_ , Clarke wants to say.

But Bellamy smiles and she finds that he knows, always has.

“Thank you.”

 

*

 

It all tumbles down because if Bellamy Blake and Clarke Griffin know how to do one thing, they know how to pull the pillars down.

It begins with Wells coming back from Paris and a strained dinner at Bellamy’s. Wells gives him a chance because Clarke asks him to but it’s easy to see that even if she has forgiven him, Wells won’t. Wells worries.

“You’re getting swept up in him again, Clarke,” he tells her when they’re in her car. The night was full of awkward silences, knocking glasses down when Wells noticed how comfortable Bellamy and Clarke were around each other.

“We’re friends.”

“Bellamy and I were friends, too, but you two are something else. You can never stay away from each other. It’s like – “ he frowns at the windshield wipers, taps the glove compartment to find the words. “It’s like you’re polar opposites and you can’t help yourself from being pulled in. It’s just – I’m worried about you, Clarke.”

He doesn’t say anything she didn’t know already because it is like that. There’s this magnetic pull, always has been, and she’s never been able to resist it.

The same pull is what made him leave without a word, only that stupid letter that broke her heart, and maybe they don’t know what else to do with themselves in this shitty life, the only option being going all in or all out.

“How long haven’t you painted?”

“Why does that matter?”

It’s her tell and Wells smiles crookedly, no real mirth to it. “Clarke.”

“Three months,” she admits with a sigh, flicking the turn signal on and taking the first right into Wells’ street.

They sit in silence until she pulls up to his building and only then does he turn to her, earnest.

“I do want you to be happy. If you can be happy with Bellamy, alright. But it’s not – it’s not healthy. The world can’t stop just because you got him back.”

Clarke flashes him a smile because it’s all she can do, weary and knowing full well that he’s speaking the truth. They gravitate to each other, bend space and time between them and it’s all-encompassing, consuming.

But the foundations aren’t right. The foundations were made to be broken.

“When did you get so wise, Wells?”

“When I realized you weren’t gonna.” He pecks her cheek, squeezes her shoulder and leaves. Raven is waiting for him in their little apartment, the two of them always here to pick Clarke up after she’s fallen down.

Bellamy used to do that, too. And then he broke her.

 

It truly ends when she comes to his place one night and the first thing he asks her is,

“Want to come with me to this thing?”

Clarke frowns at him, her thumb frozen above a remote button. “What thing?”

Bellamy waves his hands about, gesturing vaguely at nothing like he always does when he’s feeling awkward about something. He’s gotten smooth over the years but moments like these are when the nerd in him really shines through.

“This thing in honor of my book my editor insists on throwing. It’s probably going to be stuffy but there’ll be an open bar so we can always get drunk and – “

“Bellamy.”

His head snaps up so fast she swears she hears his neck let out a cracking sound and there’s a weird mixture of hope and devastation in his eyes.

“Bellamy, that’s not just _a_ thing. That’s a big thing.”

He shrugs with one shoulder, ducking his head like he always does when he wants to hide a smile or a pout. Always hiding, always half-running away. Maybe he doesn’t know better.

But Clarke’s first instinct is to say ‘yes’, no questions asked, but this time she does question it. This time she wonders what is it in her and in him that pulls them together so forcefully her lungs are crushing under the weight of it.

“Do you think that’s easy for me? After everything?”

“It’s not a date, not if you don’t want it to be.”

Clarke sighs, dropping the remote on the pillow beside her and turning to fully face him where he’s working at the kitchen table.

“Whatever it is, whatever _this_ ,” she motions between them, “is – it’s not healthy. It’s not – you can’t just waltz into my life and I know we have been pretending like it’s all good but it’s not. You can feel it, too. We’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

She sees the exact moment when it dawns on him, his smile faltering, something breaking in his eyes, fingers gripping the table so tightly that his knuckles turn white.

“That’s not – “

“It’s a catastrophe, Bellamy,” she interjects. “And I just let you. I let you fucking consume me because I was so hopeless and then you came. You left and I’m just happy to have you back. How pathetic is that?”

She’s not expecting him to stand up, cross the living room and crouch by her side, leaning his chin on the armrest. He looks earnest when he speaks again and this time she lets him finish.

“I’m sorry. I understand and I know I have been selfish but I was just happy you wanted me back. It doesn’t change anything, I know, but I promise I’ll be better. Not just try, I am _going to_ be better.”

He’s saying everything she wants him to but it still doesn’t feel right. One last time, she promises herself, one last time to take him in. His curls, wild like his heart. The constellations she still remembers painted onto his cheeks. His eyes, reflecting his soul every time. The dimple in his chin, the one she used to tease him about. Hands that are warm when she needs them to keep her safe against the chill and cold when she’s gasping for a breath in summer heat.

She takes him in because she’ll never get to see him again.

“I’m sorry, Bellamy.”

Her keys rattle when she picks them up, picks herself up even though something inexplicable inside her soul – something that is who she _is_ – teeters on the precipice of falling apart.

“Clarke, _please_ , don’t do this.”

She swallows hard, dares herself to look behind where he’s still crouching, frozen in time. The only difference is, now tears are welling up in his eyes and he looks rawer than she’d ever seen him, looks so openly wounded that it devastates her.

“I kept the letter, Bellamy,” she tells him, one last thing even though tears are threatening in the back of her eyes again. “I kept the letter and that’s when I knew you’d be a great writer. It was full of beautiful things that I desperately wanted to believe.”

The inexplicable inside her shatters into a million pieces when Bellamy chokes on the first sob and no one but Clarke hears a sound.

“Clarke,” he pleads again, a figure stuck in motion. She feels like a rag doll whose strings have been cut and now she just wavers, lets this unknown ocean float her wherever.

“I can’t do this, Bellamy, because you always pull me back in and this time – this time I’m not letting my heart get broken. Not again.”

It’s the truth and it comes with a certain ease when she lets it roll off her tongue. It’s why Wells’ words struck a chord within her heart and if she knew she could be happy with him, she never would’ve gotten up.

But how the hell is she going to be happy when they have always been an almost, always something close to coming true but never actually _becoming_?

How the hell is she going to be happy when she wants to go all in on this but Bellamy is still trying to escape, still looks like there’s a cage surrounding his heart, tries but fails?

His voice breaks when he asks the one thing she hoped to God he never would. The one thing she couldn’t handle. Because she could handle him leaving, coming back, being torn between hoping and facing the facts, but.

She can’t handle five simple words that end with a question mark.

“You said you _loved_ me. Do you still love me?”

His hands are squeezing the armrest, hers are clutching her sides because this is a fucking tornado that’s going to ruin her, this is a shipwreck that’s going to leave her stranded and every nerve in her body screams to lie.

Bellamy knows even before she says anything because, if his eyes reflected his soul – never able to hide the pain kept carefully under lock and key and allowed out only on a particularly safe day, her face was akin to a painting of hers. Showing too much, always.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters, Clarke. It matters a whole fucking lot,” he growls, finally picking himself up but lingering by the couch, every muscle in his body wound up like a string. Clarke swears she can hear electricity crackling between them. “You’re getting ready to leave and you want to do the same thing I did – leave because you’re afraid you’ll want to _stay_.”

“It’s not the same, I – “

“Well, I’ve been a fucking coward, alright? Is that what you want me to say?” A hint of hysteria creeps into his voice, Bellamy looking like he’s two seconds from tearing himself apart, desperate to put them back together. “Because I was and I’m not shying away from that. But you’re not a coward. Never have been, _Princess_.”

“Don’t call me that,” she snaps, disregarding everything else he’s said because that word, the childish nickname he gave her when she told him that the playground is hers and he’d better act nice or leave, that word has gone bitter in strangers’ mouths.

“What? Princess?”

“I am fucking telling you, Bellamy, not-to-call-me-that!”

He deflates at that, the rage he must’ve been feeling replaced by something else, something softening his gaze and making her feel like she’s too worthy and too unworthy for him. They could always wind each other up but there are lines not to be crossed.

“What happened?” he asks, earnest. There are still tear tracks on his cheeks when she looks up, stares him down defiantly.

“What happened is that you weren’t here. You think you’re the only one who is unknowable? The only one who keeps secrets, the only one who had a life?”

“No, I – “

“Fuck _you_ ,” she spits out, her hands unwrapping to rest at her sides, fingers cracking when she balls up her fists. “Fuck you for being a coward who couldn’t stay, a coward who had to leave without a word. Fuck you for trying to come back.” She takes a deep breath, Bellamy’s face twisting into a wounded grimace. “Guess what, Bellamy? I did have a life while you were gone. I was with guys and girls who loved me, broke me, did whatever the hell they wanted. The one thing I couldn’t do was love them because you were always there.”

All those years of feeling like a half of a person, wondering whether the people whose eyes show they’re in love with her can tell that she’ll never be able to love them, not when there’s Bellamy still creeping around in her heart.

He wasn’t even there but he always mattered.

“But it doesn’t matter. I might grow old and grey waiting to be free of loving you, but I won’t let you leave me like I’m nothing. I’m worth more than that. I deserve better.”

There’s a beat of silence between them, thick, jagged ends that cut them every time they take a breath, and finally, Bellamy sighs.

He looks exhausted – all those years of running away catching up with him and now they’re not two people up against each other. Now they’re older than their twenty-nine, they’re older than their bodies and stuck in a moment that begs them to just reach out and forgive one another.

“Yeah, Clarke. Yeah, you do.”

“Because you’re always running away, have you noticed that?” He averts his gaze and she knows that he has. “How you’re never all in, not even when you promised me you’d stay, always that little piece of you that doesn’t let me in, that reserves the right to pack up its bags and just leave in the dead of night.”

Truth hurts but it demands to be told, and Clarke has had it with these same words catching in her throat every time he says something that makes her hopeful.

Bellamy, for his part, looks wrecked, sad, everything at once.

“I don’t know how to change that,” he admits, his shoulders slumping as he averts his gaze. “I don’t know, Clarke.”

“You could’ve asked me. I would’ve told you that you didn’t have to run away, that it’s alright to come home now. That’s what you leaving taught me – you’ll never want to let anyone in, but you can try. You can fight for it. You can fight for _me_.”

She doesn’t know when he comes over or maybe she’s the one who does it, but they’re suddenly standing in the middle of his living room, clutching each other like a lifeline. They are wrong for each other, the departure platform on a train station, but when he pulls her in closer like he wants to catalogue every breath of hers, like she does with his little quirks – rolled up sleeves, coffee stains he doesn’t notice on his shirts for days on end, way too much sugar in that same coffee and frowning when she doesn’t add it – well, then, then she’s too desperate to leave.

So she stays. And maybe he does, too, pulling her into his bedroom. He keeps a photo of the two of them with Wells and Octavia on his bedside table now, the nicest frame in the whole apartment, and that’s what wrecks her.

The moon shines in through his window and they break in two, her weak hands cradling his face and Bellamy wringing his in his lap. Her hands are too weak to contain all that universe of longing and sadness he now lets her see and she’s begging him to let her save him because God knows he shouldn’t have to do it on his own.

He never should have. She would’ve always been there, had he let her.

“Are you trying to escape yourself, Bellamy? Because – you can’t. And you don’t have to,” she assures him, her tears equally warm as the ones sliding down his cheeks as he looks at her like she’s preaching a sermon striking him right into his heart. “You’re alright. Bellamy, you’re alright.”

He kisses her and it feels like being undone, finally a symphony worthy of echoing across the entire universe. He kisses her and it feels like it might kill him, his hands trembling on her neck as he pulls her in closer, deepens the kiss and lets her in.

They’ll be each other’s downfall but it’s alright.

“It’s alright, Bell. It’s alright.”

This time, he believes her.

 

*

 

Clarke reads Bellamy’s book with him right by her side. It’s one of the good mornings when they’ve got nothing to do and the sun is shining bright over them. He’s flustered whenever she reads out a particularly good bit and she kisses away the shyness painted in his heated cheeks.

There’s miles of skin wherever she can look, their limbs tangled and their bodies pressed close until they melt into each other, but that’s alright. This time, she can handle the pull.

“This was incredible,” she breathes out after she’s done with the last page, having fervently read through the entire book in a matter of hours. Bellamy just laughed when she waved him away after he offered her lunch.

His Persephone is running away and trying to find a home. She is not a princess who was taken, but a princess who could slay her dragons on her own.

It’s a peculiar book.

But Bellamy is a peculiar person.

He beams up at her, lifting his lips from her bare shoulder. “I’m glad you like it. I kind of hoped you’d read it.”

“I was afraid of what I’d find in there.”

“And?”

Clarke smiles at him. “I shouldn’t have been.”

In this story, she coats him in paint whenever he dares to disturb her painting to tell her that lunch is ready. In this story, he needs to only look at her for Clarke to know that tonight is a wine and fire escape kind of a night.

In this story, he brings his own walls down and tells her _his_ story.

And in this story, they are broken but they are alright. Sometimes, that’s not only enough. That’s _everything_.

**Author's Note:**

> This is it! Okay, like I said - I seriously hope you guys liked it and if you did, it would mean the world to me if you let me know - **kudos & comments** are a great way to do that.  
> Also, fic writers live off of feedback and external validation, that's just how we roll. 
> 
> I made an aesthetic post for this fic because, like I said, I got inspired by a photo of a fire escape. [You can check it out here!](http://marauders-groupie.tumblr.com/post/139506009242)


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